Film Review: A Dangerous Method

It’s difficult to make something last. This is especially true with cinema, where the eddies and tides of progress are felt more keenly. A great song will sound as good when heard decades later by a new audience, but films aren’t as lucky. They have a tendency to age poorly. Some of this is down to aesthetics, which strands them in the years they were shot (a gripping drama from the late 80s is rendered ridiculous because everyone has massive hair).

More damaging to a film’s continued relevance are sea changes in acting, particularly in regards to naturalism. Unlike theatre, where a play can be imagined anew by subsequent companies of actors and directors, a film is stuck forever with the acting styles that were prevalent at the time. Performances that garnered critical and popular acclaim in the past seem too stagey by today’s standards. And there’s no line where it stops – there’s nothing to say that films made today aren’t going to seem somehow off to the audiences that follow.

The reason this is all relevant to A Dangerous Method is that the entire film hinges on its three central performances, and one of those performances is absolutely mental.

Adapted from Christopher Hampton’s stage play, A Dangerous Method is about the complicated relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), focusing on Jung’s treatment of a troubled young girl, Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightley), and their later affair. While Mortensen and Fassbender are typically excellent, giving subtle, restrained performances, Knightley is on another plain altogether.

Throughout her career Knightley’s acting abilities has received criticism by some, but her work in A Dangerous Method is nothing if not bold. It’s a performance that’s impossible to ignore: she yells, she moans, she quivers her lips and juts out her teeth. She pounds food into mush and cackles through her throat and pulls at her skin. For much of the film Sabine is madness personified; her repulsion and shame and desire are indistinguishable and all-consuming. Regardless of whether you enjoy the performance or not, there’s something undeniably remarkable about it.

That doesn’t mean that her acting in the film is good necessarily – it’s remarkable in the strictest sense of the word. The performance is so big that it wouldn’t really be possible to discuss the film and not mention it. Whether it actually works or not is subjective; some of the most celebrated performances of cinema’s history are also the largest (significantly, they’re also the ones that receive awards). Regarding the quality of such performances, it comes down to whether you believe that accomplished acting is something that draws attention to itself or not. Even if there’s realism to be found in playing someone with such serious mental problems, Knightley is still very clearly acting. While it’s possible to appreciate the effort that’s going into the performance, that isn’t the same as inhabiting a role.

Do we want actors to inhabit roles and disappear, or do we want to see them act? There’s an argument to be made for both positions. It depends on the film, and the work of the entire cast. An outsized performance amidst more subdued ones can completely tonally unmoor a film. And yet, this unbalance can also be a deliberate decision: this seems to be the case with A Dangerous Method, where Sabine is an unpredictable, chaotic force amongst the film’s more repressed characters. As an actor, where better to express that than in the body, as Knightley does, shaking all over and trying to tear herself apart?

A Dangerous Method was screened at the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Read more of oh comelys coverage of the festival here.

Film Review: The Future

At its heart, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is endlessly hopeful. It’s a film about how difficult it is to connect with others, but how doing so can be a transformative, defining experience. It’s about the first time someone takes their hand in yours. As such, watching it is an uplifting, gorgeous experience: the sort of film you could watch again and again. In comparison, July’s second film, The Future, is the sort of film one might never want to see a second time.

That’s not a criticism. If MAYAEWK (to use an awkward acronym) is about the tentative first steps of a relationship, then The Future takes place sometime beyond that. The Future is about a relationship that no longer works, a relationship that due to its comfortableness and length has been taken for granted and as such has wilted with neglect. July shows how this begins, with the death of small kindnesses, the turning inward of oneself, and the creative ennui that stasis can provoke. It’s an everyday experience but no less horrible for it, and one that everyone encounters eventually. In its own way The Future is more wrenching than any kitchen sink drama because it’s about the horror of how the most lovely thing in your life can wither before your eyes, and then disappear, and then life just continues as if it was never there at all.

It might seem strange to describe The Future as wrenching considering that its narrator is a cat, or that it contains a sequence in which an old tee-shirt slowly crawls back to its owner, or in which a girl buries herself in her back garden. These whimsical touches may distance some from the film, and it’s a shame because these surreal moments never exist purely for the sake of quirkiness alone. Instead they work as metaphors for the emotional states of the characters, showing a fragile openness that’s easy to overlook or laugh away.

There’s a deep sadness to all of Miranda July’s work that’s sorely underrated: as an author and filmmaker she’s painfully honest about how lonely you can feel when you’re with another person. Do you stay in your comfortable, threadbare relationship or risk the strangeness and terror of something new? At a certain point one has to try and forget about how twee the idea of a cat narrator is (and it is so very, very twee), and instead place a bit of trust in what July is trying to accomplish. If you do that then you’ll find a reflection of yourself, or at least the version of you that wakes up at three in the morning and can’t drift off again, troubled because the person lying next to you became a stranger while you slept.

The Future is being screened as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Find out more information on the film here.

Welcome to the 55th BFI london film festival

If the BFI London Film Festival has a problem, it’s that it gives you too much of a good thing.

The Festival is absolutely massive, and seems to get bigger every year: a two-week monolith comprised of over 300 features and shorts, as well as masterclasses, events and special programmes. Any of its individual strands could be a completely solid film festival in its own right, so where to begin? You could easily spend the next fortnight attending as many things as possible and still barely scratch the surface.

Photo: Robert Fenzs The Sole of the Foot about people who are denied a home.

And yet, the LFF’s sheer breadth of content is its strongest quality. What could be overwhelming is in its own way inspiring: it’s impossible to thumb through the programme and not be inundated with films you’ve been looking forward to, directors you’ve heard good things about, premises that sound intriguing, and classic films you’ve always wanted to see in a cinema.

It encourages a certain boldness. Even if you end up mostly watching the Autumn’s big prestige films (almost exclusively in one of the smaller screens at the Leicester Square Vue, alas), there’s still that temptation to take a few stabs in the dark and seize the opportunity to be challenged by something. The Festival’s bulk means that watching some small cinematic gem feels even more special somehow, like you’ve discovered something.

Photo: Director Miranda July will be giving a film masterclass. © Photographer / Designer Todd Cole

With such a range on offer, it’s impossible to talk about the Festival’s highlights without getting into personal tastes: the best advice is to get a copy of the programme and make sure it ends up well-thumbed. Also, to attend any of the screen talks or masterclasses if possible: this year’s guests include Michael Winterbottom, Abi Morgan, Miranda July and Alexander Payne, all of whom are articulate, interesting, and maddeningly talented.

We’re going to be covering the Festival throughout the next two weeks so look out for future posts with impressions of films seen as well as the occasional interview and other splendid things.

Film Review: The Artist

Expectations are dangerous. There can be little more damaging to how much you enjoy a film than actually hearing about its quality before you see it. To be told that a film is terrible before viewing is to plant seeds of doubt, even for the most level-headed of cinemagoers. The same works in reverse, too: if you hear that a film is amazing then at best it will only be able to meet that expectation. At worst, it will provoke a negative reaction against a film that has committed the crime of being merely very good. Hype can only bring disappointment.

Call this the King’s Speech theory. An enjoyable, if not especially remarkable film, the experience of watching The King’s Speech for latecomers must have been soured by the attendant hype and its long road to the Oscars. Instead of being pleasantly surprised by an entertaining, well-made film, they may have wondered just what the fuss was all about.

The journey of a film from surprise hit to awards season darling to critical backlash is a depressingly familiar one. It’s a journey that’s possible to glimpse in the future of The Artist. One of the most purely enjoyable films to show at this year’s London Film Festival, The Artist is a valentine to the silent era of Hollywood. A story about a film star (Jean Dujardin) who suddenly becomes undesirable in the age of talkies, it’s a funny, warm, beautifully crafted film. Despite being black-and-white and virtually dialogue-free, The Artist is so shamelessly entertaining that a wide audience seems assured. It’s the sort of film that has the chance to be a sleeper word-of-mouth hit along the lines of something like Amelie, and yet that’s also the problem.

Sometimes when something reaches a certain level of success a natural instinct is to rebel against it, and it’s easy to see how one might start to feel that way about The Artist months down the line when your grandmother has gone to see it and you keep hearing it mentioned in checkout queues. The film isn’t perfect, mostly due a second act that drags out longer than it should, and as such it wouldn’t be difficult to be disappointed by too much hype, rather than enjoying it on its own merits. If anything, the Festival was the perfect time to appreciate it, when there were suggestions of something special but not the weight of expectation that is likely to come.

Of course, nothing is certain and perhaps the film won’t click with the public in the way that it promises to. That would be a shame. The Artist is a film whose only goal is to please its audience, and it’s very good at doing this. Joyfulness is an underrated quality, and perhaps eventual oversaturation is a small price to pay in order to obtain some of it.

The Artist is being screened as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Find out more information on the film here.

A chat with Gregg Araki about his new film, Kaboom

Ever since his 1992 debut The Living End, director Gregg Araki has been responsible for some of the most transgressive, bold and just plain silly films to have come from the indie world. In 2004 he reached an unprecedented level of critical acclaim for Mysterious Skin, a mature, devastating adaptation of Scott Heims novel about a gay hustler dealing with the memories of his childhood sexual abuse. Araki follow-up was the Citizen Kane of stoner movies Smiley Face, underrated and unreleased in the UK, and is now back with Kaboom.

Candy-coloured and lurid, Kaboom is about impossibly good-looking college students who find themselves in embroiled in a convoluted conspiracy that just about distracts them from their revolving door sex lives. Its like Araki wrote the film whilst snorting a bin liner full of sugar as Twin Peaks played on loop in the background. Maybe its awful, but somehow thats okay. Its bloody ridiculous but is about as fun as Mysterious Skin was soul-destroying.

Kaboom opens in cinemas this weekend, but we spoke to Araki when he visited the UK for the films premiere at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

You wrote Kaboom after making two films that came from other peoples source material. Would you say its a personal film to you?

Kaboom is so near and dear to my heart. Of all my movies its probably the most autobiographical one Ive ever done, which sounds weird because its such a crazy movie, but its very much based on my own experience, stuff I did when I was 20 years old and an undergraduate in Film School. I went to USC Santa Barbara which the college in the film is based on and my best friend was an art student like Stella. Thats why there are so many scenes in coffee shops because during that period of my life there were always big adventures and afterwards youd go to the coffee shop and talk about what just happened and how you felt about it.

Was it a conscious choice to make something that was more your own?

Its not like I feel like Mysterious Skin or Smiley Face are any less mine than Kaboom, because when youre working from other peoples material youre dealing with what attracts you to that material. For Mysterious Skin my mindset and sensibility is so aligned to Scott Haim. We have a similar sense of the world and so it was a natural fit for me. I brought to that film everything I could bring to it from my own experience but ultimately everything about the story and those characters was his. Its like an adopted child. I love Smiley Face and Mysterious Skin and Im so proud of both of them, but theres a difference between something that comes purely from your imagination and something that doesnt. Theres more responsibility I think.

The events of Kaboom are very dark, but it never feels that way - its like a confection. I dont mean that in a bad way.

No, I think thats very appropriate. Its interesting because I originally envisioned Kaboom as being this very dark apocalyptic epic but theres a playfulness and a sort of joyfulness about it. Despite its darkness theres a sense of fun. The world of Kaboom is so stylised and comic-book that you feel anything can happen. That was what we set out to make - the thing I dislike about 99.9% of movies is that I always know where theyre going to go before they get there.

It must have been freeing once youd decided that the film wouldnt be entirely grounded by what could happen in the real world.

I remember when we were shooting it the cast and the crew and everybody would be just like Oh, were going to Kaboomworld now. It was like its own little world and thats certainly meant to be the experience of watching it. It takes you to another place thats more stylised and colourful and everybodys beautiful and everybodys having sex. Its a utopian, dystopian world.